7. I highly encourage people not to just assume these polls are wrong

People here in GOP territory are thinking they are going to win and are fired up big time. Does that mean they're right? No, but I'm just saying I've followed politics long enough and been on here since W was Pres and back then I didnt want to believe polls where Kerry was losing, guess what, he lost. Alot of times polls are pretty accurate whether we like it or not.

9. I don't understand the hate for experts who aren't promising victory

Election night 2016 was horrific. We were absolutely unprepared emotionally for what happened. Iím pretty sure most of us remember that night as vividly as we remember 9/11 or the Challenger explosion.

Iím not sure why the cautious part of cautious optimism gets short shrift. Logically, we should have a tremendous victory because the president is such a terrible, divisive person... but as we have seen, his terribleness and divisiveness are exactly what his loathesome, hate-filled cult members worship about him, and each of their votes counts just as much as each of ours does.

11. Whatever the result, the media chuckleheads will claim they called it

One of the local stations was reporting on the Oregon governor's race between incumbent Democrat Kate Brown and former legislator Republican Knute Buehler. The race hasn't been extensively polled, but every one I've seen has had Brown leading by 3-5%, all within the margin of error (as the media folks never tire of pointing out). The point being that while the race is close, it consistently polls in Brown's favor.

Also, in vote-by-mail Oregon, the numbers of ballots returned are a matter of public record (not who you voted for, just that your ballot has been received by the county registrar). The other significant datapoint that made the news report this past week is that as of Wednesday (I think), 27% of Republican ballots and 27.4% of Democratic ballots had been returned. Oooh, close! Well, perhaps not. There are more Democrats registered in Oregon than Republicans. And, while not every Democrat votes for the Democratic candidate, neither does every Republican vote for the Republican. Democrats enjoy a small edge percentagewise, but in terms of raw numbers, that means that there are quite a few more Democratic ballots than Republican ballots that have been turned in. If Democrats have 125,000 registered voters and Republicans have 100,000 voters, equal percentages means that there are 6,000-7,000 more ballots marked by a Democrat.

So, after all the whoa-nelly-what-a-horse-race reportage, the facts of a presumed Brown victory on Tuesday are hiding in plain sight; the media for some reason just didn't elucidate what those poll number consistently said or how reporting just the percentages of ballots disguised the actual number of votes for each party.